The Days I Do Nothing Are In It

There is a way of counting in your head and I want to describe it back to you, because I do not think you have looked at it directly.

Every day is either a day you did something or a day you did not.

The days you did something are neutral. They are what you are supposed to do. They do not earn anything, they merely fail to lose ground.

The days you did nothing are debits. They are entered against you, and they accumulate, and at any moment you could tell me roughly how many there have been recently.

So the arrangement you are living inside has a losing column and no winning column, and a person cannot survive inside that for very long without something going out of them.

And here is the piece I most want to name. The days off are not gaps in the keeping. In every arrangement that has ever worked, in any part of life, the rest is inside the design rather than outside it.

The sabbath was made for man

There is a sentence of Jesus about rest that is one of the boldest in the Gospels.

And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath. (Mark 2:27, King James Version)

Made for man.

Now the thing to notice is the direction of service. The rest is not something a person owes. It is something made and given, for their benefit, on purpose, by somebody who intended them to have it.

And it is not an interruption to the work. It is built into the same week as the work by the same designer, which means the week was never six days of doing with a failure at the end. It was always seven days, and one of them was for stopping, and the stopping is part of the design rather than a hole in it.

That is a completely different arithmetic from the one running in your head.

You are not accumulating debits, and Mark 2:27 has never once described rest as something owed or lost. It is written as a thing made for a person's benefit, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the failure out of a day when nothing happened.

You have been running a week with no rest built into it. The word puts the stopping inside the design rather than outside it, and the Spirit of God is the one who gave the day off in the first place.

Days off belong inside this, not beside it

Now the practical piece, and it is a change in the accounting.

At the moment, if you do fifteen minutes on four days out of seven, you experience it as three failures.

Somebody else doing exactly the same four days experiences it as four times. Same actions. Same house. Entirely different life.

You have been running the same week as everybody else and paying for it differently, and no set of four days has ever once been three failures. Mark 2:27 makes the rest a thing given for a person's good, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves an empty day out of the losing column.

The difference is not effort. It is whether the empty days are inside the arrangement or against it.

So we put them inside. From tonight, the days you do nothing are part of this rather than exceptions to it. They are not permission and they are not indulgence. They are the shape of a week that a human being can actually live in.

You were never failing on the days you rested, and there has never once been a working arrangement anywhere in life without stopping built into it. Mark 2:27 makes the rest for the person rather than the person for the rest, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves an empty day out of the losing column.

And I am not going to give you a number of days, because a number is a schedule and this site does not do those. Some weeks will be four and some will be one and some will be none, and every one of those weeks is a week where this was going on.

You are permitted to have a week with nothing in it and still be a person who is doing this, and the two have never once been in contradiction. It is written that the sabbath was made for man, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a day when nothing happens at all.

Fifteen minutes, and count the empty days in

So here is the whole of it, and there is a counting step tonight.

Set a timer for fifteen minutes and work on anything. When it goes, stop.

Then, before bed, do this once. Think of the last empty day you had, the one you entered against yourself, and say out loud: that day was in it too.

That is the whole of the extra step and it is the part that will still be working in a year.

Then stop and do nothing else.

You are able to count a day off as part of this tonight, and counting it has never once been letting yourself off. Mark 2:27 makes the rest a gift inside the design, and the Spirit of God is present in a sentence said over a day when nothing happened.